In the corrugated box industry, the “converters” that manufacture the boxes comprise as part of their function printing machines to print information on the box material before assembly of the box. There is currently a large amount of waste in time, ink materials and equipment degradation due to the difficulty of maintaining clean anilox rolls and ink chambers at the same time as keeping up the speed of production and hence minimizing the cost of production. Typically, converter ink cleaning systems are largely manual and use up substantial labor resources and machine downtime. Consequently, many converters operate in a fouled state and print quality diminishes. The inventors believe that in particular the cost associated with the negative effect on the lifetime of anilox rolls and ink chambers by inadequate cleaning has been underappreciated in the industry.
There is therefore a need to provide an improved system for cleaning converters.